Adventures in blog land

Lisa Mitchell climbs a few ivory towers to see how blogs are transforming peer review and collaboration in academia.

ACADEMIC technocrats are pushing fusty colleagues to the brink of information technology adventure with their latest research toy - the blog.

The blogosphere is doubling every five-and-a-half months, according to United States blog tracker Technorati. About 75,000 new blogs emerge each day, and 43 million blogs have been set up worldwide.

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While ordinary folk drive the blogging phenomenon through citizen journalism and mass vanity publishing, educators are latching on to its research potential: efficient tracking of thought processes, instant publishing and distribution of ideas worldwide. Online, it seems, reputations can rocket among peers.

Academics wondering whether they should venture into cyberspace should consider its reach, says Adrian Miles, a senior lecturer in new media in the school of applied communication at RMIT University.

"I have about 1000 readers a week, and that's a very small blog. I know other people who have major academic blogs and I would expect their readership to be between 5000 and 10,000 a week," Mr Miles says.

"Even if I get published in a major international journal, realistically, maybe 100 people would read my article." Mr Miles' blog - VLOG 3.0 - is about video blogging.

Essentially, a blog is a more flexible version of a discussion list or online forum. Users self-publish their thoughts and ideas on the net with free, easy-to-use blogging software (more complex software is available for reasonable fees) and visitors log in to respond, creating threads of discussion that can be archived but accessed at any time.

In August last year, former Deakin University academic James Farmer founded edublogs.org, a blogging site for educational professionals. Edublogs now has 10,000 users, of whom he estimates 70 to 80 per cent are US academics.

Mr Farmer was recently appointed online community editor at The Age.

"If you want a successful academic career, you have to impress a large number of readers and have a great deal of credibility, and that only comes from peer-to-peer review, which is people reading and recommending and subscribing back to you," he says.

Tracking engines help bloggers map the number of readers and links to their blogs to confirm their level of blogging authority.

"Generally, the articles that have been published online have about 10 times more references from other papers (or blogs) than the articles that have been published in just paper," contends Mr Farmer.

Academic blogs offer a more informal, first-draft-style of writing and do not threaten traditional scholarly writing that represents months of carefully grown ideas and sifted thoughts, threshed from countless sources, all scrupulously cited before being reviewed by peers. Some academics believe they allow them to make even greater contributions, however.

"It's a different type of publication ... I think the really in-depth papers will be referred to a lot less, at least in the area of humanities," Mr Farmer says.

"It (blogging) certainly ensures you can play a direct role in public debate," says Kimberlee Weatherall, a lecturer in law at the University of Melbourne and author of Weatherall's Law and Law Font blogs.

"At the time I started (blogging), the debates on intellectual property (IP) were occurring at such a speed that peer-reviewed articles were very much commentary after the fact ... I felt almost obliged to get the information out there. It's an adjunct to the research we do," says Ms Weatherall, whose specialties include IP and copyright law.

Too often, academics say, they attend conferences where hundreds of papers are presented to slim audiences of as few as 10 colleagues.

"Ninety per cent (of papers) are of very little value. The only reason they've been created is to satisfy the publishing points (required for universities to receive government funding)," Mr Farmer says.

Blogs might not return coveted publishing points but they do produce career-expanding outcomes, says Greg Restall, an associate professor in the department of philosophy at the University of Melbourne. As a result of his blog, consequently.org, students have approached him to supervise their PhDs, he has been asked to write for an edited collection of work and been invited to attend conferences and to teach summer school.

"People who are blogging as junior academics as part of their PhDs have a profile way beyond anyone similar could have expected to have at that age," says Dr Restall. "It's really changing the face of research."

As blogging proliferates, there is less need to visit the library to keep up to date with publications of current thoughts and theories. The swirl of ideas and feedback circulating in blog land encourages consistent refinement of research ideas. Blogs also allow academics to keep more meaningful audit trails of works-in-progress, seeing authors must articulate their ideas well, yet succinctly, for readers. Academics say blogging is like a 24-hour-a-day, 365-day-a-year conference.

RMIT's Mr Miles says: "The normal process for someone like me would be to send an abstract to conference, write the paper, which would be unfinished, present it at the conference, usually to an audience of 10, get feedback from it and then I might go off and write the paper - that process could be 18 months. I could do all that in a week in a blog."

Of course, time taken to blog means less time towards point-producing journal articles. Should universities be working on a system of reward-points for blogs? Mr Miles says academics should be allowed to submit to their departments blog posts that are deemed of sufficient quality when held up against certain criteria.

But this is not likely when you consider that a law academic's significant contribution to, say, a law reform review or draft legislation does not secure merit points, according to Melissa de Zwart, a senior lecturer specialising in internet law at Monash University.

Blogging academics are also discovering the limits of their new tool. The onus is on the reader to scrutinise the integrity of ideas presented, and the legitimacy and worth of contacts met on the net instead of the conference circuit may take longer to appraise. Tracking blogs of interest in your field is time consuming too.

"It's very hard for people to write consistently good material so there's a lot of blogs that start and disappear," says Lisa Wise, an online learning specialist at the University of Melbourne and author of the Wisebytes blog. She is concerned about how easily ideas or comments can be misinterpreted online.

"If you're in a room in a seminar and you say some controversial things ... or if it's implicitly critical of what someone else is doing, they are in the room and can take it up with you," she says. Bloggers can make comment, but there remain those who choose not to respond.

"You're not necessarily in a position to know how you've affected somebody else, and to me, that is important," says Dr Wise.

For example, blogging deteriorated quickly into a slagging match on law expert James McConvill's blog recently after one contributor made highly inappropriate, personal remarks about another contributor. Other contributors were preoccupied with inflating or deflating the author.

"Why don't you all grow up," chastised one regular contributor to the James McConvill Blog. "Man oh man, academics have way too much time on their hands."

Even though the blog does not identify its author as a senior lecturer in law at La Trobe University, you wonder about the potential such inflammatory discussions have to affect a blogger's academic reputation.

"The question, I suppose, is if you operate something like this, do you choose to moderate it or do you deliberately choose not to moderate it?" says Dr de Zwart. "Because if you choose to moderate ... any content that doesn't fit should be removed immediately. There is an argument then that you are more liable ... because you're assuming control."

Dr de Zwart believes a code of conduct should apply to blogs as it does to discussion lists - no spamming, no commercial use and no inappropriate language or off-topic discussion. "It's more like an old problem in a slightly new environment ... and of course defamation is going to be a problem," she says.

The academics interviewed by The Age believe that so long as blogs remain separate from the university, there should be no reason for concern if controversial or personal matter is posted. However, many academic blogs do retain university links, and although academic interests are the main focus, the personal chatter that characterises the vast majority of blogs does crop up.

For example, Mr McConville strikes a few highly strung chords among contributors in a discussion titled "Girls in Designer Labels". Dr Restall writes about episodes in the life of his son, Zachary, and Mr Miles airs a beef about prams - "When did prams lose their fourth wheel and feel the need to become all-terrain vehicles?"

But Ms Weatherall adds: "People come to my blog not to hear how my day was but to get my expert views on current events or the latest news, so anything else is really, in my view, a distraction."

It seems that academics who delay their entry to the blogosphere may risk increasing the digital divide and their standing within the now global academic community.

"A lot who read my blog are peers, working in my field internationally. My reputation, in many ways, is largely based on my online identity," Mr Miles says.